George Edward Mannering

“ Leaping from rock to rock, avoiding the scrub and Spaniards by sticking to the moraine slopes, and scrambling over great tali of boulders which came from the mountain sides, by evening we reached our destination (the Ball Glacier) , and finding the surveyor's chain, tent poles, and hatchet—left by Fox and myself the previous season—in good order, we quickly had a comfortable camp pitched. A small army of mountain parrots or keas soon assembled, and the unerring shanghai procured grilled kea for supper. ”

“ We congratulated ourselves that all our weary toil and hard swagging had not been fruitless, and felt quite compensated for the miseries we had gone through at the lower camp, though the main object of our visit, we feared, was about to be defeated in a very short time. We pulled ourselves together, put on the rope, and resolved to make some pretence of a fight for it.
After an hour's work we reached the highest rocks, then there came a dip on to a snow saddle, beyond which, again, snow slopes lead on to the final summit of the spur which hid the Great Plateau. ”

“ Scraping away all the larger stones from under an overhanging rock and building a semicircular break-wind, we dug holes for our hips (one gets very sore in hard beds of this nature if such a precaution be neglected) , wriggled into our blanket-bags, boiled a pannikin of Liebig, and slept like tops till the morning. ”

“ On arriving at the Hermitage we found that the Hooker River was up and quite impassable for horses, consequently we were forced to cross the Mueller Glacier by the Hermitage, walk up the Hooker Valley, and cross the terminal face of that glacier on to the western slopes of the Mount Cook Range, after which we worked our way down the river till opposite the Hermitage again, where a length of fencing wire was thrown across the torrent by which we were able to take our swags over. ”